| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Gregory A. Barton. Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography, number 34.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xiii, 192. $55.00.
Here is yet another book on the evolution of forestry in colonial India, but one with a twist: far from the passion of Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, well removed from John Muir and the Sierra Club, the real roots of environmentalism lie with the "hard-headed environmentalists" (p. 1) of the British Empire. Call this the first neo-conservative interpretation of the movement.	1
In this brief volume, Gregory A. Barton argues that progressive administrators of British India, at the height of the Raj, realized the many benefits of protecting the vast forests of India. Under the guidance of the Benthamite directors of the East India Company, the government of India developed a plan that evolved into the multiple-use policy that guides forestry in the contemporary United States. Barton sets up the environmental historians Donald Worster and Richard Grove as his straw men. He singles out Worster for romanticizing environmentalism in Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1995) and Grove for a failure to define environmentalism in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860 (1995). Barton believes that environmental histories, particularly those studies covering the nineteenth century, have been weakened by a liberal strain of anti-imperialism. With this in mind, the author focuses instead on the guardianship of the servants of empire as exemplifying the true roots of the environmental movement.	. . .

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